Books: To Have and Not

By Poornima Apte

December 2014

The Lives of Others is remarkably nuanced, notes POORNIMA APTE
in her review of Neel Mukherjee’s novel, which was shortlisted for
the 2014 Man Booker Prize. The plot doesn’t devolve into cliché
thanks to Mukherjee’s accomplished writing, reminding one of
Jhumpa Lahiri, who also touches on Maoist revolt in The Lowland.

The unequal distribution of wealth, the yawning
gap between the haves and have-nots—these are societal
constructs all over the world, but Indians know that
the contrast is especially striking on the streets of the
large urban centers in their country. It’s a difference that
does not manifest itself merely in outward readily verifiable
points of departure but is one that is woven into
the society’s fabric for generations. It’s also something
that Supratik Ghosh, the scion of a Kolkata industrial
family, finds hard to bear. Labeling it an injustice, indeed
one of society’s greatest ills, the young idealist, leaving
home and college, decides to immerse himself in the
rural Bengal countryside and try his hand at leveling the
playing field even in some small measure.

In his sprawling yet pithy novel, Mukherjee spins
the story outward and back in from one fundamental
societal unit: the family. Echoing Marx in his philosophies,
Supratik asks his mother, “Has the thought ever
crossed your mind that the family is the primary unit
of exploitation?” Even setting aside the larger political
canvas for a moment, he seems to say, the family
is the microcosm for the problems that plague society.
The Ghoshes are a perfect example: the basis for their
wealth has been a string of paper mills launched by the
patriarch of the family, Prafullanath Ghosh. Through a
set of expertly calculated decisions and good timing, the
business has weathered many a storm over the years.
Yet the seemingly stable foundations started to teeter in
the late 50s and as the novel opens in the mid 1960s, the
family business is already in decay, with loans and the
disposal of jewelry keeping the facade from fraying. The
irony is that the very affluent conditions that Supratik
bemoans are part of a lifestyle that is already in decline.

The joint family, comprising Prafullanath and his
wife Charubala, their three married sons and families,
an unmarried daughter, Chaya, and Purba, the youngest
son’s widow and her kids, together occupy a large
house in south Calcutta. The widow Purba and her son
and daughter are housed in a small storage room on the
ground floor and survive on the most meager portions of
rice and daal, and borrowed school supplies for the kids.
The family servant, Madan, has served the Ghoshes for
generations but is always reminded of his place parallel
and apart from the higher caste people he works for.

Mukherjee narrates the story in alternate tones
and voices: Supratik’s tale takes the form of letters he
pens to an unnamed narrator (whose identity slowly
becomes apparent toward the end). These alternate
with third-person stories of the many characters in the
Ghosh family. These chapters feel very much like one
is watching the members interact through the means
of an external telephoto lens: the reader is privy to the
larger family dynamics at play, and learns about the
various secrets and petty jealousies that will poison
relationships long before the job is done. There are times
when the endless machinations of the players feel trying
and claustrophobic. The novel could definitely have
used some editing, especially when Supratik’s soulsearching
occasionally begins to wear the reader down.
Yet there are some eloquent passages here—almost
two entire pages are devoted to loving descriptions of
the traditional Bengali shaat lahari haar (seven-stranded
necklace)—that are worth the time and space.

Supratik’s gradual coming of age, as his zealous
idealism gets slowly ground down, is remarkably well
done. “One thought became steadily inescapable: we
could only poke the government into a kind of low-grade
irritability, but never scale that up to something
life-changing, something that would bring the system
crashing down. All this hurling of bombs, burning of
trams, headlines in newspapers—to what avail? The
condition of the people remained unchanged,” he points
out. That a further involvement barely makes a dent in
a system that’s been entrenched for years is a lesson in
reality that Supratik must bear.

One of the many characters in this soulful novel
raises a fundamental question about the function of the
story in literature: “Should stories be about the familiar
world or should they show us something new each
time?” It is to Neel Mukherjee’s immense credit that he
manages to do both. By training his empathetic lens on
the lives of others, on one troubled yet human family, he
takes something familiar and crafts it into something
altogether new.

Poornima Apte is a Massachusetts-based reviewer of
fiction and nonfiction.

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